Urban Landscapes Transform with Verdant Venice Group

In 2018, Isabelle Duvivier, an architect and expert in sustainable urban design, moved to a street in Venice with no trees on it. For a lifelong native plant enthusiast and member of the CNPS Los Angeles/Santa Monica Mountains Chapter, this was an untenable situation. So, she says, “I started figuring out how to get trees planted in our community.” Duvivier knew that Noël Johnston, who was a neighborhood councilmember at the time, shared her interest in native plants. The two paired up to form a tree-planting working group. After placing trees on Duvivier’s street, they decided to keep going, collaborating with the city to install native plants at the local Mar Vista Gardens housing project. They called their new project the Verdant Venice Group (VVG).

Duvivier immediately started recruiting friends, neighbors, and even strangers to volunteer. When Venice real estate agent Janin Paine stepped outside one morning to find a friend walking down her street with Duvivier, a partnership was born. “Isabelle just looked at me and said, ‘You need some trees in front of your house.’ ” fondly recalls Paine, a member of CNPS’s San Luis Obispo Chapter, who became fast friends with Duvivier and eventually joined VVG as its volunteer director of marketing and development.

Since that day, Duvivier and Paine have collaborated with a growing roster of volunteers to plant native species throughout the neighborhood they love. Duvivier says she has always been a “native plant person,” an interest that began when she took a botany class at a local college, where students took group trips into the Santa Monica Mountains to create native plant books. She says it’s important to bring native plants out of the limited spaces of nature preserves and back onto city streets across Venice and beyond.

In their work with VVG, Duvivier and Paine have surrounded un-air-conditioned housing projects with shade-providing trees like coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia) and California bay laurel (Umbellularia californica). They have restored dunes along Venice’s iconic Ocean Front Walk, removing invasive grasses and planting erosion-fighting species like dune primrose (Oenothera deltoides) and yellow sand verbena (Abrona latifolia) along the famous pathways where roller skaters dance to ’90s hip-hop and tourists snap pictures of palm trees by the beach. They have transformed the streets surrounding the original Gold’s Gym with plants like dark star ceanothus (Ceanothus ‘Dark Star’) and California goldenrod (Solidago velutina ssp. californica), also planting gardens in two schools and four parks. Flora joined the Verdant Venice Group on one of their regular weekend workdays as they teamed up to transform the landscape, like their mission statement puts it, “one tree at a time.”